“The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America”: https://tinyurl.com/mryc7n8c This is the real “Hillbilly Elegy.” If you want to understand the rural MAGA mentality, this is the place. What we’ve got here is Clinton, Arkansas. Not Fayetteville, the hip Arkansas, not Little Rock, the urban Arkansas, but nowhere Arkansas, where […]

“The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood”: https://tinyurl.com/39p9w4kz This is a fabulous book. I was not planning to read it. Read the reviews, reserved it at the library, but I’m anti-nonfiction, I find that fiction resonates more, and I’d just finished a couple of music biographies that made me feel like I […]

“Pineapple Street”: https://tinyurl.com/5c3vmd4b As in the book doesn’t demand much, but calls out to you and keeps you reading. As a matter of fact, once I started, I finished in a day. Because I was invested, I wanted to know how it all turned out. This is the story of the rich you don’t see […]

https://tinyurl.com/yc3anpmh This book is mind-blowingly good. But you won’t feel that way at first, you’ll think it’s a trifle, a direct lift of “Saturday Night Live,” akin to Curtis Sittenfeld’s book about Hillary Clinton, “Rodham,” wherein she breaks up with Bill before marriage and a different story ensues. I mean “Rodham” is a good read, […]